1) The "metal tube" myth: Get in an elevator, and compare the performance of a 2G (GSM, CDMA) phone and a 3G (UMTS) phone -- you might be surprised. In the 2100MHz band at least, most 3G phones work just fine.
2) The "hundreds of MPH" myth: Nope. Phones are not banned on high speed trains in Europe or Asia, which also travel at hundreds of MPH. The story I heard was that it's not the speed of the handoffs that's the problem, it's the fact that a phone in an airplane at cruising altitude can see too many base stations at once, hence it becomes difficult to route the call properly.
Ah yes, arguing will get your problem resolved, but herein lies another problem. Not arguing will NOT get your problem resolved. In other words, these policies are putting us on the road to the way they haggle for basic purchases in places like Mexico and China.
I suspect that this tactic works in Canada because Canadians are stereotypically less inclined to argue. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that this doesn't scale, and is a net negative for society in general.
Nowadays everyone is clued in to the whole "retention plan" scam, and all the three of the Evil Triumvirate Canadian telcoms reserve their best plans for their most vocal and persistent customers who are willing to play chicken with the customer service rep. Frankly, I'd rather not have to fight just to get a fair deal. This kind of stuff should be outlawed.
Data-gathering flights... will originate at the South Korean island of Cheju, located... in the projected path of pollution plumes originating in various cities in China including the capital.
But take one look at the map in the article and... hey, wait a minute... Jeju/Cheju Island is located right smack in the middle of that blue blob in the lower middle of the photo!! And since the caption says "Areas in red depict the dimensions of the main aerosol mass emanating from Beijing", that means Jeju is exactly the WRONG place to gather data, since it's out of the aerosol stream.
This is a factual inconsistency in the article, as the map and the text contradict each other. Granted, most Americans couldn't find Jeju on the map, but that's still no excuse for poor attention to geography on the part of the article writers.
Which makes one wonder why these measurements aren't being taken in China. Oh wait, but of course they are. It's just that the measurements are being done by Chinese scientists... and the fact that they aren't working in cooperation with the American scientists is just further evidence that there is a real information Great Wall between these countries...
Mod parent up. Negotiation works a lot better when you speak the same language, and people seem a lot less like machines when the communication bandwidth increases.:-)
Also, there might be some reasons you're not aware of: some food safety laws in Japan are much stricter than in other countries. The point-of-sale system likely isn't only responsible for figuring the bill, but also tracks inventory of the ingredients that go into the food and their storage times. Are you willing to reprogram the system for a special order that likely won't be requested again in the future? Also, suppose the sausage has to be cooked up to a certain temperature per the food safety laws, but serving it with the pasta might not be able to guarantee that it's reached that temp -- thus exposing the restaurant to liability. These kinds of things are to some degree taken to an extreme in Japan -- but in a way, that's the price you pay for decent food safety and a culture of responsibility towards one's customers.
Anyway, the point is, as the parent said, generalizations are easy to come by but sometimes there is some unseen, or uncommunicated, rationale. Somehow I doubt there is much excusable rationale with the Verizon case though...
"Japan is the perfect market for this device" -- as much as it would be nice if that were true, unfortunately the infrastructure in Japan makes that seem unlikely. Case in point: the train platforms in some parts of Shinjuku station are less than a meter wide -- just barely enough to squeeze in two lines of people travelling in opposite directions. Lots of stuff is built around the concepts of trying to avoid wasted space and "a little effort goes a long way" (i.e., expect your users to just suck it up and grin and bear it). Of course, the lack of extra space or slack in many aspects of life are responsible for Japan's infamous inaccessibility to big people, and it also means that it's going to be impossible to operate a device like the Winglet in many areas of Japan with older infrastructure.
So I doubt you'll see one in any of the mainstream populated areas any time soon -- but it might have niche market value just like the Segway.
TFA introduces some new ".shielded" file format. But do we need yet another file format when PAR (Parchive) has been doing the same job for years now? The PAR2 format is standardized and well-supported cross-platform, and might just have a future even IF you believe that Usenet is dying...
I always thought it would be cool to have a script that:
Runs at night and creates PAR2 files for the data on your HD.
Occasionally verifies file integrity against the PAR2 files.
With a system like this, you wouldn't have to worry about throwing away old backups for fear that some random bit error might have crept into your newer backups. Also, if you back up the PAR2 files together with your data, as your backup media gradually degrades with time, you could rescue the data and move it to new media before it was too late.
Of course, at the filesystem level there is always error correction, but having experienced the occasional bit error, I'd like the extra security that having a PAR2 file around would provide. Also, filesystem-level error correction tends to happen silently and not give you any warning until it fails and your data is gone. So a user-level, user-adjustable redundancy feature that's portable across filesystems and uses a standard file format like PAR would be really useful.
That's because the "server" implementation you described really ought to be called "redirecting". As you said, there's *still* a lot of confusion about SPF because of the unfortunate ambiguity of this term. Blanket statements like "SPF breaks forwarding" don't help either.
So the title of this article really ought to be "Gmail, SPF, and Broken Email Redirecting" since most people's concept of "email forwarding" involves hitting the Forward button on their MUA client, or setting forwarding rules therein (which doesn't break under SPF).
It's 2008, folks. I can't believe we're still mired in confusion over terms like "forwarding" and "bouncing" (which could either mean generating a backscatter-prone bounce message, or rejecting the message during the SMTP transaction, which all MTAs really really really really really need to get on the ball with...)
Those $25 consultations were some of the best money I spent during my time as an American "expat" in Canada. And the contact details of the lawyers I met will really come in handy in the future should the need arise.
Umm, no, actually that's pretty much all incorrect too, but you do have a karma bonus modifier while I don't, so I guess that makes your opinions about "the Japanese" more valid than mine...
The Japanese don't have such an irrational fear of databases and information. In part because of their culture
That's simply not true. Where is the data to back up your claim?
In 2005 the Personal Information Privacy Law went into effect, and pretty much anyone who works for a company in Japan has had a stern talking-to about the consequences of information leakage (which nevertheless occurred in a series of scandals over the past few years). Data from 2/2007 shows that almost 80% of company employees surveyed said that the law had affected their business. IANAL, but my impression is that the law is more of a European-style law; in general, Japan has stronger privacy laws than the USA.
The fact that the debate about National ID is even occurring in Japan is evidence that people are concerned about personal information. Of course, the politicians pull out the usual set of excuses: "It's Necessary to Fight Terrorism" and "The Americans Are Doing It, So Why Don't We?" -- the same lame stuff that got the fingerprinting machines installed at immigration ports.
Anyway, I generally turn on my BS filter for any messages that begin with "THE Japanese...", but I thought this story should be set straight. Public backlash is the reason that the national ID component of Juki Net was never implemented.
Indeed that does answer my question and more.:) In any case, I'm sure there are quite a few folks who could use a program like you described, so I hope you have time to open source it or distribute it somehow. Thanks!
That makes a lot of sense, and in fact, if you bought a mobile phone from NTT DoCoMo in Japan within the last year or so, the AC adaptor was not included by default. Most users are upgrading from a previous phone anyway, and the connector has been standardized for a few years now, so there are lots of options -- even a power brick shaped like Hello Kitty that lights up when your phone is charging.
Anyway, your vision of standardiation in terms of power has been realized for the most part with mobile phones in Japan. It would be so great if notebook manufacturers can get their act together in the same way!
you don't need all those features in the first place. If you really needed them, you'd know enough to ask for them in the first place. These guys are just overblown salesmen
And so you really don't understand the Japanese mobile phone market, or most non-slashdotters for that matter. Phones are part fashion accessory, part lifestyle choice. In Japan this is taken to an extreme by the maturity of the wireless market -- you have feature competition, but you also have more subjective competition based on astheticdesign.
The feature lists have long since expanded beyond the point where you can just make a simple feature chart and linearly increasing price. Are you willing to trade 5 mm of thickness for lack of GPS? What percentage of your friends are on the same carrier and what will that percentage be in the future? That kind of stuff.
Wait for it, here comes the car analogy... one does not buy cars simply on a feature-price comparison. Nor clothes (well, maybe *you* do). So the cell phone sommelier is kind of a fashion or personal image consultant, not just a salesman as you describe.
Now that reforms in mobile handset subsidies in Japan have exposed the real cost of handsets to consumers, a mobile phone purchase is something you're going to have to live with for one or two years. Coupled with the complication of navigating price plans, feature lists, and design considerations, being able to consult an expert on a mobile phone purchase sounds like a great idea to me.
said Mr. Kirsch. "At 95 percent you miss 50 out of 1,000. So other systems give you 25 times as much spam. Who wants that? Nobody we know."
Um, wait a minute. Given two hypothetical spam filters, one with 99.8% rejection but a nasty habit of discarding legitimate emails, and another with 95% rejection but effectively zero false positives, I'd rather take the 95% filter, thank you!
Here we go, yet again. The New York Times, of all places, reports nothing but the "spam catch rate". But the false positive rate is a far more important indicator of a spam filter's effectiveness than the "spam catch rate". I'd rather have to delete the occasional spam than miss an important email from a long-lost friend.
Why are people still comfortable talking exclusively about the "spam catch rate"? Are we really that gullible to the marketing drivel of anti-spam companies? Shouldn't we be holding the discourse to a higher standard?
Exactly, I do the same thing. Honeypot accounts provide a training signal to the spam filter.
Of course, the spammers' workaround is to permute, randomize, or otherwise vary the messages. Done well enough it can cause the spam filter to fail to recognize the similarities between messages received at different accounts.
As this "Abaca Email Protection" is susceptible to the same problem, I don't see any evidence that it can substaintiate its pompous claims of being "revolutionary", "mathematically guaranteed", or "spammer proof". Who the heck writes that stuff anyway?
My point exactly -- the image you posted is 11 times bigger than, say, the one on yahoo.co.jp (scroll down for it), and it contains less data (shorter URL). And a 2-inch square is quite a big chunk of a business card or brochure, so my point remains that some of the earlier comments in this thread about putting 7K of data on a reasonably small QR code are rather overly "optimistic" unless the macro focus issue is taken into account.
Interesting that your device has macro focus. I wonder what percentage of devices in North America have that feature nowadays?
Current phone hardware in Canada won't be able to scan most Japanese-style QR codes, because they lack a macro-focus lens. Examine any phone from Japan and you'll find either a hardware or software "tulip icon" switch for macro-focus.
With QR codes, you trade-off data size vs. physical size vs. the resolving ability of the phone's camera. Someone mentioned having one on a business card. A QR code containing the contents of the business card (name, position, email, phone, address, URL, etc.) would have to be printed at a size way bigger than the card itself, in order for it to be readable without macro-focus. At a more reasonable printed size of something like 2 cm square, you'd be able to fit a URL or a name, if it's short enough. That kind of information density might be useful for advertisers who want to stick a scannable URL on a flyer (remember CueCat?) -- but only if the phone's user interface makes it less of a pain in the butt to fire up the QR code scanner than to simply type in the URL.
Other factors such as lighting, scratched lens, and movement (scanning while riding the bus or train) can affect QR code readability as well.
And now on my soapbox... unfortunately, open software only goes so far. With mobile, we need more freedom and choice in the hardware space in order to really make progress. And as long as the North American carriers continue to do things "their way" (e.g., CDMA), we still have a long way to go.
The current government in Canada is getting pretty good at pulling the wool over the public's eyes under the guise of modernizing technology laws in harmony with the US. Yesterday they announced that part of the AWS spectrum auction would be "reserved" for new bidders. This successfully convinced the public and media that they were finally going to encourage competition in one of the most medieval wireless markets in the world. Yay, if Verizon can become open, so can Bell/Telus/Rogers and its bitch, Fido!
Unfortunately, the truth is that due to Canadian ownership laws, the only entities capable of starting an entirely new wireless network from scratch are the likes of cablecos (Quebecor/Videotron)... as if that's going to bring any of the openness and innovation we really need.
The bottom line is that Harper's government, through the Canadian DMCA or the wireless auction or anything else, is simply out to protect the same old sheltered brats of Canadian big business -- the ones whose lack of innovation render them internationally uncompetitive.
While the US and Australia seem posed to move forward in the next 5 years, unfortunately Canada is in for a slide backwards.
Was that really the will of the Canadian people? Sometimes I wonder...
Here we go again. TFA, and most of the comments in this thread, are missing a critical piece of information. It doesn't make sense to say that a spam filter is N percent effective because that misses the false positive rate which is really more important. I don't care if you catch 99% of my spam when 10% of the emails that I need -- and probably closer to 80% of the unexpected and important ones like contacts from long-lost friends -- are dumped.
The merit of GMail's spam filter, as opposed to, say, *cough* Hotmail is not that it achieves a better spam rejection rate, but that it is relatively conservative with false positives. As others have pointed out, its spam rejection rate is hardly anything to write home about.
As technologists and consumers of reports like the Wired article, we should demand better quality of discourse. The blue line on the graph (spam rejection rate) shows continuous improvement in the spam rejection rate, but that is meaningless of the false positives are going up at the same time. Being blind to important data like that is what turned Hotmail's spam filter into the mess that it is today, and it's no exaggeration to say that the inability to trust that an email will be delivered is slowly rendering the medium useless for lots of people in the real world.
In fact, as long as we hold spam filters to some reasonable standard of spam rejection (>95%) I'd argue that we really should start assessing filters based simply on the risk of a false positive. Changing the discourse like this will allow us to make real progress in helping users, rather than simply focusing on "rejecting the bad from outside" (sound like something generalizable to society? hmmmm)
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh, mythbusting time...
1) The "metal tube" myth: Get in an elevator, and compare the performance of a 2G (GSM, CDMA) phone and a 3G (UMTS) phone -- you might be surprised. In the 2100MHz band at least, most 3G phones work just fine.
2) The "hundreds of MPH" myth: Nope. Phones are not banned on high speed trains in Europe or Asia, which also travel at hundreds of MPH. The story I heard was that it's not the speed of the handoffs that's the problem, it's the fact that a phone in an airplane at cruising altitude can see too many base stations at once, hence it becomes difficult to route the call properly.
Holy ancient links Batman! If China mandated USB charging for all phones in 2006, are all phones in compliance today?
Ah yes, arguing will get your problem resolved, but herein lies another problem. Not arguing will NOT get your problem resolved. In other words, these policies are putting us on the road to the way they haggle for basic purchases in places like Mexico and China.
I suspect that this tactic works in Canada because Canadians are stereotypically less inclined to argue. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that this doesn't scale, and is a net negative for society in general.
Nowadays everyone is clued in to the whole "retention plan" scam, and all the three of the Evil Triumvirate Canadian telcoms reserve their best plans for their most vocal and persistent customers who are willing to play chicken with the customer service rep. Frankly, I'd rather not have to fight just to get a fair deal. This kind of stuff should be outlawed.
Mod parent up! Legal or not, all customers are forced to sign the "may be changed unilaterally by TELUS" clause as part of the contract.
Has anyone challenged these "unlimited power" clauses before?
From TFA:
But take one look at the map in the article and ... hey, wait a minute... Jeju/Cheju Island is located right smack in the middle of that blue blob in the lower middle of the photo!! And since the caption says "Areas in red depict the dimensions of the main aerosol mass emanating from Beijing", that means Jeju is exactly the WRONG place to gather data, since it's out of the aerosol stream.
This is a factual inconsistency in the article, as the map and the text contradict each other. Granted, most Americans couldn't find Jeju on the map, but that's still no excuse for poor attention to geography on the part of the article writers.
Which makes one wonder why these measurements aren't being taken in China. Oh wait, but of course they are. It's just that the measurements are being done by Chinese scientists ... and the fact that they aren't working in cooperation with the American scientists is just further evidence that there is a real information Great Wall between these countries...
Mod parent up. Negotiation works a lot better when you speak the same language, and people seem a lot less like machines when the communication bandwidth increases. :-)
Also, there might be some reasons you're not aware of: some food safety laws in Japan are much stricter than in other countries. The point-of-sale system likely isn't only responsible for figuring the bill, but also tracks inventory of the ingredients that go into the food and their storage times. Are you willing to reprogram the system for a special order that likely won't be requested again in the future? Also, suppose the sausage has to be cooked up to a certain temperature per the food safety laws, but serving it with the pasta might not be able to guarantee that it's reached that temp -- thus exposing the restaurant to liability. These kinds of things are to some degree taken to an extreme in Japan -- but in a way, that's the price you pay for decent food safety and a culture of responsibility towards one's customers.
Anyway, the point is, as the parent said, generalizations are easy to come by but sometimes there is some unseen, or uncommunicated, rationale. Somehow I doubt there is much excusable rationale with the Verizon case though...
"Japan is the perfect market for this device" -- as much as it would be nice if that were true, unfortunately the infrastructure in Japan makes that seem unlikely. Case in point: the train platforms in some parts of Shinjuku station are less than a meter wide -- just barely enough to squeeze in two lines of people travelling in opposite directions. Lots of stuff is built around the concepts of trying to avoid wasted space and "a little effort goes a long way" (i.e., expect your users to just suck it up and grin and bear it). Of course, the lack of extra space or slack in many aspects of life are responsible for Japan's infamous inaccessibility to big people, and it also means that it's going to be impossible to operate a device like the Winglet in many areas of Japan with older infrastructure.
So I doubt you'll see one in any of the mainstream populated areas any time soon -- but it might have niche market value just like the Segway.
TFA introduces some new ".shielded" file format. But do we need yet another file format when PAR (Parchive) has been doing the same job for years now? The PAR2 format is standardized and well-supported cross-platform, and might just have a future even IF you believe that Usenet is dying...
I always thought it would be cool to have a script that:
With a system like this, you wouldn't have to worry about throwing away old backups for fear that some random bit error might have crept into your newer backups. Also, if you back up the PAR2 files together with your data, as your backup media gradually degrades with time, you could rescue the data and move it to new media before it was too late.
Of course, at the filesystem level there is always error correction, but having experienced the occasional bit error, I'd like the extra security that having a PAR2 file around would provide. Also, filesystem-level error correction tends to happen silently and not give you any warning until it fails and your data is gone. So a user-level, user-adjustable redundancy feature that's portable across filesystems and uses a standard file format like PAR would be really useful.
You must be new here. When did we ever see CARRIER LOST? It was always NO CARRIER.
And don't even get me started on the immediate follow-up with "... in all seriousness". :-)
That's because the "server" implementation you described really ought to be called "redirecting". As you said, there's *still* a lot of confusion about SPF because of the unfortunate ambiguity of this term. Blanket statements like "SPF breaks forwarding" don't help either.
So the title of this article really ought to be "Gmail, SPF, and Broken Email Redirecting" since most people's concept of "email forwarding" involves hitting the Forward button on their MUA client, or setting forwarding rules therein (which doesn't break under SPF).
It's 2008, folks. I can't believe we're still mired in confusion over terms like "forwarding" and "bouncing" (which could either mean generating a backscatter-prone bounce message, or rejecting the message during the SMTP transaction, which all MTAs really really really really really need to get on the ball with ...)
I agree, although you might be hard up to find a single lawyer who can answer *all* those questions at once...
In any case, since the OP mentioned (s)he's moving to Vancouver, the BC Bar Association's Lawyer Referral Service might be handy.
http://www.cba.org/bc/initiatives/main/lawyer_referral.aspx
Those $25 consultations were some of the best money I spent during my time as an American "expat" in Canada. And the contact details of the lawyers I met will really come in handy in the future should the need arise.
Umm, no, actually that's pretty much all incorrect too, but you do have a karma bonus modifier while I don't, so I guess that makes your opinions about "the Japanese" more valid than mine...
That's simply not true. Where is the data to back up your claim?
In 2005 the Personal Information Privacy Law went into effect, and pretty much anyone who works for a company in Japan has had a stern talking-to about the consequences of information leakage (which nevertheless occurred in a series of scandals over the past few years). Data from 2/2007 shows that almost 80% of company employees surveyed said that the law had affected their business. IANAL, but my impression is that the law is more of a European-style law; in general, Japan has stronger privacy laws than the USA.
The fact that the debate about National ID is even occurring in Japan is evidence that people are concerned about personal information. Of course, the politicians pull out the usual set of excuses: "It's Necessary to Fight Terrorism" and "The Americans Are Doing It, So Why Don't We?" -- the same lame stuff that got the fingerprinting machines installed at immigration ports.
Anyway, I generally turn on my BS filter for any messages that begin with "THE Japanese ..." , but I thought this story should be set straight. Public backlash is the reason that the national ID component of Juki Net was never implemented.
Indeed that does answer my question and more. :) In any case, I'm sure there are quite a few folks who could use a program like you described, so I hope you have time to open source it or distribute it somehow. Thanks!
Interesting post. So, what's the name of the auto-sync software that you mentioned?
That makes a lot of sense, and in fact, if you bought a mobile phone from NTT DoCoMo in Japan within the last year or so, the AC adaptor was not included by default. Most users are upgrading from a previous phone anyway, and the connector has been standardized for a few years now, so there are lots of options -- even a power brick shaped like Hello Kitty that lights up when your phone is charging.
Anyway, your vision of standardiation in terms of power has been realized for the most part with mobile phones in Japan. It would be so great if notebook manufacturers can get their act together in the same way!
And so you really don't understand the Japanese mobile phone market, or most non-slashdotters for that matter. Phones are part fashion accessory, part lifestyle choice. In Japan this is taken to an extreme by the maturity of the wireless market -- you have feature competition, but you also have more subjective competition based on asthetic design.
The feature lists have long since expanded beyond the point where you can just make a simple feature chart and linearly increasing price. Are you willing to trade 5 mm of thickness for lack of GPS? What percentage of your friends are on the same carrier and what will that percentage be in the future? That kind of stuff.
Wait for it, here comes the car analogy ... one does not buy cars simply on a feature-price comparison. Nor clothes (well, maybe *you* do). So the cell phone sommelier is kind of a fashion or personal image consultant, not just a salesman as you describe.
Now that reforms in mobile handset subsidies in Japan have exposed the real cost of handsets to consumers, a mobile phone purchase is something you're going to have to live with for one or two years. Coupled with the complication of navigating price plans, feature lists, and design considerations, being able to consult an expert on a mobile phone purchase sounds like a great idea to me.
Thanks for visiting the O2 Online Shop
They won't even let you see the product page, based on your IP! Yup, sounds like they've got it just the way the carrier likes it.Unfortunately, we are unable to sell to countries outside the UK.
Hey, they've got more plants and natural light in the Korean office...
From TFA:
Um, wait a minute. Given two hypothetical spam filters, one with 99.8% rejection but a nasty habit of discarding legitimate emails, and another with 95% rejection but effectively zero false positives, I'd rather take the 95% filter, thank you!
Here we go, yet again. The New York Times, of all places, reports nothing but the "spam catch rate". But the false positive rate is a far more important indicator of a spam filter's effectiveness than the "spam catch rate". I'd rather have to delete the occasional spam than miss an important email from a long-lost friend.
Why are people still comfortable talking exclusively about the "spam catch rate"? Are we really that gullible to the marketing drivel of anti-spam companies? Shouldn't we be holding the discourse to a higher standard?
Exactly, I do the same thing. Honeypot accounts provide a training signal to the spam filter.
Of course, the spammers' workaround is to permute, randomize, or otherwise vary the messages. Done well enough it can cause the spam filter to fail to recognize the similarities between messages received at different accounts.
As this "Abaca Email Protection" is susceptible to the same problem, I don't see any evidence that it can substaintiate its pompous claims of being "revolutionary", "mathematically guaranteed", or "spammer proof". Who the heck writes that stuff anyway?
My point exactly -- the image you posted is 11 times bigger than, say, the one on yahoo.co.jp (scroll down for it), and it contains less data (shorter URL). And a 2-inch square is quite a big chunk of a business card or brochure, so my point remains that some of the earlier comments in this thread about putting 7K of data on a reasonably small QR code are rather overly "optimistic" unless the macro focus issue is taken into account.
Interesting that your device has macro focus. I wonder what percentage of devices in North America have that feature nowadays?
Current phone hardware in Canada won't be able to scan most Japanese-style QR codes, because they lack a macro-focus lens. Examine any phone from Japan and you'll find either a hardware or software "tulip icon" switch for macro-focus.
With QR codes, you trade-off data size vs. physical size vs. the resolving ability of the phone's camera. Someone mentioned having one on a business card. A QR code containing the contents of the business card (name, position, email, phone, address, URL, etc.) would have to be printed at a size way bigger than the card itself, in order for it to be readable without macro-focus. At a more reasonable printed size of something like 2 cm square, you'd be able to fit a URL or a name, if it's short enough. That kind of information density might be useful for advertisers who want to stick a scannable URL on a flyer (remember CueCat?) -- but only if the phone's user interface makes it less of a pain in the butt to fire up the QR code scanner than to simply type in the URL.
Other factors such as lighting, scratched lens, and movement (scanning while riding the bus or train) can affect QR code readability as well.
And now on my soapbox ... unfortunately, open software only goes so far. With mobile, we need more freedom and choice in the hardware space in order to really make progress. And as long as the North American carriers continue to do things "their way" (e.g., CDMA), we still have a long way to go.
What timing.
The current government in Canada is getting pretty good at pulling the wool over the public's eyes under the guise of modernizing technology laws in harmony with the US. Yesterday they announced that part of the AWS spectrum auction would be "reserved" for new bidders. This successfully convinced the public and media that they were finally going to encourage competition in one of the most medieval wireless markets in the world. Yay, if Verizon can become open, so can Bell/Telus/Rogers and its bitch, Fido!
Unfortunately, the truth is that due to Canadian ownership laws, the only entities capable of starting an entirely new wireless network from scratch are the likes of cablecos (Quebecor/Videotron) ... as if that's going to bring any of the openness and innovation we really need.
The bottom line is that Harper's government, through the Canadian DMCA or the wireless auction or anything else, is simply out to protect the same old sheltered brats of Canadian big business -- the ones whose lack of innovation render them internationally uncompetitive.
While the US and Australia seem posed to move forward in the next 5 years, unfortunately Canada is in for a slide backwards.
Was that really the will of the Canadian people? Sometimes I wonder...Here we go again. TFA, and most of the comments in this thread, are missing a critical piece of information. It doesn't make sense to say that a spam filter is N percent effective because that misses the false positive rate which is really more important. I don't care if you catch 99% of my spam when 10% of the emails that I need -- and probably closer to 80% of the unexpected and important ones like contacts from long-lost friends -- are dumped.
The merit of GMail's spam filter, as opposed to, say, *cough* Hotmail is not that it achieves a better spam rejection rate, but that it is relatively conservative with false positives. As others have pointed out, its spam rejection rate is hardly anything to write home about.
As technologists and consumers of reports like the Wired article, we should demand better quality of discourse. The blue line on the graph (spam rejection rate) shows continuous improvement in the spam rejection rate, but that is meaningless of the false positives are going up at the same time. Being blind to important data like that is what turned Hotmail's spam filter into the mess that it is today, and it's no exaggeration to say that the inability to trust that an email will be delivered is slowly rendering the medium useless for lots of people in the real world.
In fact, as long as we hold spam filters to some reasonable standard of spam rejection (>95%) I'd argue that we really should start assessing filters based simply on the risk of a false positive. Changing the discourse like this will allow us to make real progress in helping users, rather than simply focusing on "rejecting the bad from outside" (sound like something generalizable to society? hmmmm)